Turkish Lira

Have you started updating your fonts with the turkish lira yet? I’m doing a version update of Siri anyhow, and decided to include it. It sure would be fun to see more examples of the turkish lira from your typefaces, so please show them here if you’d like.

Don’t rush into the bitcoin future. The finite supply of Bitcoins makes them terribly prone to deflation. So in the long run they’re not terribly likely to serve much purpose other than keeping tech journalists occupied.

James, unlike decimal or similarly structured currency, Bitcoins are arbitrarily divisible. You can purchase something for e.g. 0.00005 BTC. This makes the finite limit on the total possible number of Bitcoins irrelevant to their valuation.

Mark is right that it is a bad idea to hijack the generic currency placeholder character -- or any other standard Unicode character -- for the Bitcoin symbol. If a symbol is standardised for Bitcoins, then there's a good chance it will get proposed to Unicode and eventually encoded. Personally, I think all currency symbols are stupid, and it would be great if the Bitcoin community, unlike the Indian and Turkish governments, were to decide that they don't need or want a symbol.

Don’t rush into the bitcoin future. So in the long run they’re not terribly likely to serve much purpose other than keeping tech journalists occupied.

Bitcoins are used by money brokers to shuffle money around without any government or bank control.This anonymous and tax-free qualites makes them valuable, regardless of the exchange rate.I guess long-term success will depend on the ability of Bitcoins to remain independent of government controls.

Not clearer, because when I see $ I can only rely on context to know whether it means USD or CAD. Around the world, the same symbol is used for dozens of currencies (not all of them dollars). As someone who works with clients and associate designers around the world, I've come to the conclusion that currency symbols are only of local relevance, so maybe not 'stupid' but of severely limited use in a globalised economy. The recent adoption of official currency symbols by India and Turkey seem to me to accentuate the essential parochialism of currency symbols, because what are claimed to be signs of mature emergence on an international stage are really political symbolism for domestic consumption. The real measure of the economic power of these countries in international markets is recorded, for clarity and efficiency, with three-letter codes.

The global world of text is full of 'parochialism'. How about eth, thorn, and tons of diacritics? If the US can have $, the Euro countries can have €, the UK can have £ — then countries like Turkey and India can have their own currency symbol too. Too bad for font designers without time on their hands who have to add these new currency symbols to their fonts — but that's another story.

Don't get me wrong: I'm very much in favour of localism, and of organically evolved signs and symbols making their way into standard use. But that's not the context in which governments of what The Economist calls 'developing markets' decide to introduce official currency symbols. The irony is that precisely the developments of globalisation that recommend the precision of the unique three-letter code system spur some governments to these symbolic gestures. The Indian rupee and the Turkish lira have both been around for many decades, and the local users of the currencies have managed without these symbols.